Building an audience: Using blogging, social networks, email newsletters and viral marketing instead of SEO

by Brian Brady

Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL

Author website

“Brian Brady is that mortgage guy in the suspenders on the internet.”

Good or bad, that’s my brand on the internet. That goofy picture was taken at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood on a free Kodak machine. I emailed myself the picture and have been using it for the past two years in all of my online marketing efforts. And while I’m not necessarily the best user of photoshop, I’m a pretty damned good viral marketer.

I met Rudy of Sellsius earlier this year and he said “You’re all over the internet.” I dropped my daughter off at school last month and one of her schoolmate’s parents said “I saw you on Zillow.” My neighbors have told me that they read my articles on MySpace. I organized a coup to take over the Trulia Voices section.

I guest author on BloodhoundBlog, NELA Live, Long Beach Real Estate Home, Sacramento’s Real Estate Voice and maintain an active profile and weblog on the Active Rain Real Estate Network. Lately, I’ve started experimenting on Gather.com.

To the untrained observer, I appear to be on an ego trip. To bloggers, I’m eschewing SEO for a viral marketing approach. I’m not going to wait for a customer to find me on the long tail search. I’m going to insert my goofy little suspenders picture in every imaginable place they might search for real estate related advice.

Does it work?

Well, I’ve received over 1,000 inquiries in the past 12 months from my efforts. Many are from borrowers, so my answer is, “Damn, Skippy, it works!” I’m slowly building up a database of people who have connected with me on the internet. My long-term goal is to have over 10,000 people in my permission-based email marketing database, receiving a newsletter each month. I’m at 1,012 today and I think I’ll be there in about 3-5 years.

Here are five tips to help you build an audience for your budding real estate weblog:

1. Start an email newsletter. I use Constant Contact because I can send a newsletter which has a teaser for my blog articles. It costs about $40/month. You must be very careful to not send unsolicited emails from Constant Contact. I try to send a newsletter every 3-4 weeks to the database. I have the ability to stratify the data into various affinity groups so I can target my articles to their interests.
2. Start networking — socially that is. Engage yourself on the growing social networks, contribute by commenting and writing, and pick up the damn phone! If someone leaves a number of comments on an article, call them up and say hello. Engage in a conversation and get permission to put them on your email newsletter list.
3. Know your audience. Your audience should be closely aligned with your service offering. If you are a neighborhood Realtor in Tampa, it is unlikely that other Tampa Realtors are a good audience. Miami and Jacksonville Realtors, however, are. So are Philadelphia Realtors, St Paul Realtors, Chicago Realtors, and Des Moines Realtors. All of those cities are top feeder cities for the migration to Tampa. My audience is Realtors in California, Nevada, and Arizona.
4. Have an alternate audience. In the Tampa example, Mac Dill Air Force Base has a $6.5 billion impact on the local economy. Developing a series of articles about wealth building through real estate while in the service should be well received. My own alternative audience is financial planners.
5. Get out of your industry! Start reading “cat-blogs” to connect with everyone else. What I mean by that is that you need to expand your interests outside of our RE.net world. My father encouraged me to play baseball in high school but he was equally as encouraging of the Chess Club or Debating Society. In fact, he insisted that I pursue both athletics and other extra-curricular activities so as to round out my circle of friends. If you’re in Tampa, try the Tampa Blog Directory. I’m sure there’s one in your city, too.

Why is this important? If you are a commercial weblogger (and you are if you intend to get leads from your writing), you must stay ahead of everyone else. Right now, the world believes that if you write it, they will come. Today, that may be the case. Tomorrow, however, the field will be crowded with every two-month licensee with an English degree, gumming up the blogosphere. Your SEO results will be skewed as soon as one of us presents at the NAR convention, explaining the benefits of blogging as a marketing communication.

Weblogging is cheap, easy, and fun. Writing a weblog can be a tremendous way to introduce your service offering to thousands of people in a very short time span. Do it right, today, and you won’t be caught in the gummed blogosphere tomorrow.